Of Apple, Microsoft, and Australian music stores

blog We present the following three items of evidence for your consideration.

1. In a media release issued on 25 October 2005, Apple announced that it would launch its iTunes Music Store in Australia, featuring individual songs priced at $1.69 and albums at $16.99. “We’re thrilled to bring the revolutionary iTunes Music Store to Australia,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, at the time. “iTunes features the largest catalogue of local and international music in Australia with over one million songs, enabling music fans to purchase their favourites with one click and have them automatically sync to their iPod.”

3. The authorised biography of Steve Jobs published last week contains the following paragraphs, detailing Jobs’ 2002 battle with music studios over the launch of the iTunes Music Store, which came after the failure of several previous subscription music services launched by Sony, Universal, AOL Time Warner and more:

Jobs’ proposal was to sell digital songs for 99 cents — a simple and impulsive purchase. The record companies would get 70 cents of that. Jobs insisted that this would be more appealing than the monthly subscription model preferred by the music companies.

He believed that people had an emotional connection to the songs they loved. They wanted to own ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Shelter from the Storm’, not just rent them. As he told Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone at the time, “I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.”

In short … some six years after Apple launched its online music store in Australia, a store which sold billions of songs, Microsoft is following suit, using a subscription model which Steve Jobs rejected almost a decade ago, and which had publicly failed several times. And Microsoft is still not quite sure whether the ‘per song’ pricing model works.

I agree. I’m looking for Spotify’s boat to finally arrive, but in the mean time I’m sure both Aussie owners of Windows phones are celebrating Zune’s arrival.

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Written by Delimiter Publisher Renai LeMay, The Frustrated State is the first in-depth book examining of how Australia’s political sector is systematically mismanaging technological change and crushing hopes that our nation will ever take its rightful place globally as a digital powerhouse and home of innovation.

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